Who Pays Who in the EU

Created on: 2024/05/19

This map is created from data by the European Commission on spending and revenue of the EU from the different member states from the following source.

The EU revenues and spending are combined to get a single number to see if a country is a net beneficiary or contributor. This number is then divided by the population number, to get the amount per capita.

When looking at the data a lot of money was flowing into Belgium and also Luxembourg. Upon closer inspection it turned out that part of the spending was spending, not on the member state, but on the EU itself within this state. With the headquarters in Brussels, it is obvious that this effect is showing up in Belgium.

Since this gives a skewed view, this share has been removed from the data for this map.

As a final note, and just to make it very clear, this data shows the EU budget only. This does not say anything about the usefulness of the EU in general, or if there are actually winners and losers in the first place.